[kindpastor]

There are few experiments I've looked over that require distillation--I checked online and most distillation apparatuses cost 80-100 bucks in the low range.  The process seems simple enough and I was wondering if I could just make my own.  I could be very wrong though and don't want to injure myself or screw up the experiment (please excuse terrible art skills):



I'm by no means a chemist and I was hoping those more proficient could tell me if this would suffice.

[Bakegaku]

Ah... I remember in 8th grade I made one of those (slightly more sophisticated... I used a conic flask and some glass tubing I bought from a hobby shop.  I intended to make methanol out of wood with it, but could never get it to actually condense into a liquid (always made a fog in the collection jar...) and the tube got clogged with tar...

Aside from reminiscing, if you want to do this make sure the jar is tightly sealed and fire proof, but add a second tube into the collection flask to vent pressure, or your still will explode.  Depending on what you distill, a rubber tube might not be heat-resistant enough.

[UnintentionalChaos]

I've tried to do this before as well, but was attempting to steam distill cinnamon. Please spend a few dollars and buy a piece of lab glass for the heating vessel (although depending on what you're distilling, an old solvent can or pressure cooker can be modified to do the same job. If this is for alcohol or anything else flammable and the mason jar shatters and dumps its contents directly onto the flame, you will have serious issues. Even with pressure release, my mason jar shattered from heat stress (soda lime glass with thick walls) and poured vile, sticky cinnamon sludge all over the work surface.

You will have issues cooling the gasses with that setup. Have you considered that you can't magically feed tubing through the side of a water filled bucket? I wrapped my tubing around a canister of heavily salted ice water, but the tubing ended up being too narrow anyway and I got jack squat. You can rig a crude condenser with copper piping and some plumbing parts (assuming the distillate won't attack copper). Run cold water over it to cool or devise something more sophisticated.

This should really be in citizen chemist.